The present invention relates to a manual scraping tool and blade and their use for removing a layer of material such as paint or wallpaper from a planar surface.
Hand-held or manual scraping tools have long been used to remove materials such as paint and wall coverings like wallpaper from walls and other planar surfaces. Commercially available hand-held scraper devices generally have a handle portion and an attached jaw portion in which is clamped or otherwise held a thin metal blade such as a razor blade. With a new blade, such manual scraper tools are highly effective for removing thin layers of material adhered to substrates such as paint or wallpaper without damaging the integrity of the underlying substrate surface.
A drawback to such commercial scrapers is that with continued use, chips or small pieces of the material being removed from the substrate surface become lodged or jammed in the paint scraper between the scraper blade and the jaws, or other clamping pieces, of the scraper tool holding the blade in place. This results in flexing or deformation of the thin metal blade to an extent that damage to the substrate surface often occurs and the blade no longer efficiently scrapes material from the substrate. A common occurrence is that the deflection of the blade, although imperceptibly small, results in gouging or scraping of the substrate surface. In addition, removal of the layer of material being scraped is often incomplete, since the scraper blade no longer contacts the substrate along its entire blade length. As a result, the user must periodically loosen or remove the blade in the scraper tool jaws and clean the area of the scraper tool that grips the blade to remove or dislodge the chips and small pieces of material causing the problems. If the blade shows signs of being permanently damaged, a replacement blade must also be inserted into the scraping tool before reuse.
In the removal of some materials such as brittle paint layers, the chips and pieces of dislodged material become jammed between the scraper blade and scraper tool jaws with such frequency that periodic cleaning is futile, since the tool scraping effectiveness is severely reduced almost immediately.
Although the problem of chips and pieces of the scraped material becoming lodged or jammed in the paint scraper tool around the scraper blade may at first glance appear to be a minor problem, this drawback to commercial scraper tools currently being marketed represents a significant impediment to the efficient use of such tools.
A need therefore exists for a scraper tool and blade design that overcomes these drawbacks of prior art hand-held scraper tools.